Has this kind of thing ever happened to you?
I’ve been reading a lot of J.D. Salinger in the past week, and spent an hour or so before going to bed last night reading a couple of his stories. I woke up in the middle of the night, and it was like my mind had been reprogrammed to think the way Salinger writes. Something odd was going on outside (see below), and my brain, of its own accord, composed a short vignette about it that could have come from a Salinger novel. This has happened to me before, like when I was reading a lot of David Foster Wallace. Anyway, here is what it came up with:
If you ever think that birds do not communicate, or that the human brain will not do its best in a state of half-sleep to make sense of their chirping, you should try, some time, being woken up in the middle of a warm night by a pair of blue jays flapping around your courtyard, screeching at each other like madmen in a fit of what could be antagonism or courtship, their cries echoing off brick walls and entering in your window open just enough to allow the room to inhale and exhale the summer breeze. They will talk to you.
